A Data-Informed View of Engagement with Home-based Digital Self-management for Older Adults with Chronic Conditions

Yiyang Sheng MRes

Ageing populations are resulting in a higher prevalence of people with multiple chronic conditions (multimorbidity). Digital health platforms have great potential to support self-management of multimorbidity: increasing a person’s awareness of their health and well-being, supporting better understanding of diseases, and encouraging behaviour change. However, little research has explored the long-term engagement of older adults with such digital interventions. The aim of this project is to explore, through analysis of an existing dataset, patterns of engagement of older adults with two or more chronic conditions with digital self-management, in particular symptom and wellbeing monitoring, with the goal of better understanding how to promote sustained engagement over time.

Objectives:

  1. Review the literature on digital home-based self-management systems for chronic disease, with a focus on literature examining engagement, including engagement of older adults, with such systems.

  2. Analyse an existing dataset to understand patterns of engagement of older adults with symptom and wellbeing monitoring (e.g. blood pressure, self-reported mood).

  3. Conduct clustering to determine how different categories of users, for example users of different age groups or with different conditions, engage with symptom monitoring, self-reporting and physical activity.

  4. Develop a set of design recommendations, validated by healthcare professionals, to enhance engagement with applications supporting chronic disease self-management, with a focus on recommendations for both individual conditions and combinations of conditions.

Supervisors

Primary

Dr. Julie Doyle, Director, NetwellCASALA, DkIT

Secondary

Rajesh Jaiswal MS, PhD, TUD

Other supervisors

Prof. Raymond Bond, School of Computing & Mathematics, UU

Expected completion date of study

August 2022

Publications to date

Papangelis, K., Metzger, M., Sheng, Y., Liang, H.N., Chamberlain, A. and Khan, V.J., 2017, May. “ Get Off My Lawn!” Starting to Understand Territoriality in Location Based Mobile Games. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1955-1961).

Papangelis, K., Sheng, Y., Liang, H.N., Chamberlain, A., Khan, V.J. and Cao, T., 2017, September. Unfolding the interplay of self-identity and expressions of territoriality in location-based social networks. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (pp. 177-180).